Herald comes clean on Super Bowl book

Talk about hypocrisy. The Boston Herald took a swipe at the Globe today
because our book about the Patriots' undefeated season was already
available for pre-order on Amazon.com. But what the Herald didn't tell its
readers was that it was hawking its own book, "New England Patriots: 2008
Super Bowl Champions."

Amazon removed the Globe's book, titled "19-0: The
Historic Championship Season of New England's Unbeatable Patriots," after
the Herald reported that Amazon was promoting it. Later in the day, Amazon
also removed the Herald book.

So why didn't the Herald come clean about its
own book today? Turns out the paper wasn't entirely forthcoming about
its staff's involvement in it.

"The distinction between the Herald's book
and the Globe's book," Herald spokeswoman Gwen Gage wrote us in an e-mail,
"is that we instructed the publisher not to market our book as authored by
the Boston Herald until the Patriots win the Super Bowl."

Of course, such
books are always prepared in advance. As Gage conceded in her e-mail: "The
realities of selling 'Championship' books -- on the Web and in bookstores -- is that they have to be in the market quickly, and by necessity publishers
pre-sell them." (Too bad the Herald didn't think to mention that
today.)

It's also worth noting that the Herald's story speculated that
Giants Coach Tom Coughlin could use word of the Globe's book as a way to
fire up his team. Problem with that is that, as of last night, you could
still pre-order a book about the Giants' Super Bowl win on Amazon.